DoT EP70: Spencer Garland is PR Newman, plus New Music from The Innocence Mission

If you listened to EP69 with comedian and author Guy Branum, you heard a little taste of the new PR Newman album, Turn Out. If not, I hope you’ll take a listen and come back to this conversation. There is a lot to talk about with this music. I got an advance of the album a month or so ago, and wound up listening to it in the car over and over for the next several days – which is the mark of a good album. Car listening is essential. Every time I listened, I heard something different. It starts out with an optimistic song that is nonetheless called “Got To Hell.” I enjoy that kind of contradiction, a friction between the sound and lyrical content. I heard Apostrophe-Overnite Sensation era Frank Zappa in the next track, “Here Come the Rangers,” especially in regards to Zappa’s wonderful use of the Ikettes as backup singers. I heard solo Frank Black in one song, the Kinks in the next, countrified Byrds in another. Spencer Garland, the musician behind PR Newman, has chops as a player and a songwriter, and he has a sense of humor. That’s a full toolkit. 

I caught up with Garland just before he left for a short tour of Germany to talk about how PR Newman came about and the inspiration for the songs. Turn out is the debut full-length album for the project, which is mostly Garland with some other players. Garland spent years in bands as a side guy, playing guitar or organ, so this is him stepping out front, even though it’s not under his real name. The name PR Newman comes from a comment someone made after seeing him play, calling him a “punk rock Randy Newman.” There is a bit of a persona involved, and Garland reserves the right to wait for a different project until he releases something as Spencer Garland. 

Our featured track of the week, “Look Out From Your Window” by The Innocence Mission from their latest album Sun On the Square. This is the band’s tenth album over their near thirty-year history. If you’re new to the band, you might think this is an Irish import because of the pastoral sounds and subjects and the lilt in singer Karen Peris’s voice. The band actually started in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and when I went looking for an explanation for the accent, I found a show review from the L.A. Time back in 1991 written by Chris Willman, who also puzzled over its origin. His best guess, he wrote, was “European and otherworldly.” 

The music reminds me of that moment when winter is changing to spring, a time with a promise of warmth and growth, when your bones still remember the cold and isolation. “Look Out From Your Window” starts with the narrator asking, “Look out from your window now/Can you see me cheering for you, up and down?” The story seems to follow two people looking at the same weather, the same snow and leaves, and the narrator wondering if they are seeing it the same way. The refrain is, “All I cannot say I hope you know/All you cannot say I hope I can hear.” Take a listen for yourself.